Israel Wants US To Blockade Iran

By Cernig

Echoing US conservative calls from last year by the likes of Fred Thomson, Israel is reportedly calling upon the United States to mount a naval and air blockade of Iran.

Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert has urged the United States to impose a naval blockade on Iran to pressure it to stop its controversial nuclear programme, the Haaretz daily reported on Wednesday.

Olmert raised the issue during a meeting in Jerusalem on Tuesday with US House of Representatives Speaker Nancy Pelosi, the newspaper said.

"The present economic sanctions on Iran have exhausted themselves," Olmert was quoted as telling the California Democrat.

Asked about the report, Olmert's spokesman Mark Regev would say only: "We do not confirm this information."

Rafi Eitan, a member of Olmert's security cabinet, said he also favoured air travel restrictions against Iran.

"A blockade of maritime and air routes against Iran is a good possibility," Eitan, the minister in charge of pensioners' affairs, told public radio.

"There are voices we hear in Washington that indicate the military option remains open," he added.

It sounds so innocuous, doesn't it - just another form of sanction. But let's be clearer than conservatives - a military blockade is an act of war under international law and would require a UN resolution to be legitimate. It would place the US military, as a proxy for Israel, in close and belligerent proximity to Iran's military and would almost certainly lead to a full-on shooting war.

Back in 2006, when everyone worried about such a war pushing oil prices over $100 a barrel rather than the $200 we might expect now, Time magazine laid out what that might look like - and eventually it calls for boots on the ground that aren't available or the U.S. blinking.

Retired Air Force Colonel Sam Gardiner, who taught strategy at the National War College, has been conducting a mock U.S.-Iran war game for American policymakers for the past five years. Virtually every time he runs the game, Gardiner says, a similar nightmare scenario unfolds: the U.S. attack, no matter how successful, spawns a variety of asymmetrical retaliations by Tehran. First comes terrorism: Iran's initial reaction to air strikes might be to authorize a Hizballah attack on Israel, in order to draw Israel into the war and rally public support at home.

Next, Iran might try to foment as much mayhem as possible inside the two nations on its flanks, Afghanistan and Iraq, where more than 160,000 U.S. troops hold a tenuous grip on local populations. Iran has already dabbled in partnership with warlords in western Afghanistan, where U.S. military authority has never been strong; it would be a small step to lend aid to Taliban forces gaining strength in the south. Meanwhile, Tehran has links to the main factions in Iraq, which would welcome a boost in money and weapons, if just to strengthen their hand against rivals. Analysts generally believe that Iran could in a short time orchestrate a dramatic increase in the number and severity of attacks on U.S. troops in Iraq. As Syed Ayad, a secular Shi'ite cleric and Iraqi Member of Parliament says, "America owns the sky of Iraq with their Apaches, but Iran owns the ground."

Next, there is oil. The Persian Gulf, a traffic jam on good days, would become a parking lot. Iran could plant mines and launch dozens of armed boats into the bottleneck, choking off the shipping lanes in the Strait of Hormuz and causing a massive disruption of oil-tanker traffic. A low-key Iranian mining operation in 1987 forced the U.S. to reflag Kuwaiti oil tankers and escort them, in slow-moving files of one and two, up and down the Persian Gulf. A more intense operation would probably send oil prices soaring above $100 per bbl. � which may explain why the Navy wants to be sure its small fleet of minesweepers is ready to go into action at a moment's notice. It is unlikely that Iran would turn off its own oil spigot or halt its exports through pipelines overland, but it could direct its proxies in Iraq and Saudi Arabia to attack pipelines, wells and shipment points inside those countries, further choking supply and driving up prices.

That kind of retaliation could quickly transform a relatively limited U.S. mission in Iran into a much more complicated one involving regime change. An Iran determined to use all its available weapons to counterattack the U.S. and its allies would present a challenge to American prestige that no Commander in Chief would be likely to tolerate for long. Zinni, for one, believes an attack on Iran could eventually lead to U.S. troops on the ground. "You've got to be careful with your assumptions," he says. "In Iraq, the assumption was that it would be a liberation, not an occupation. You've got to be prepared for the worst case, and the worst case involving Iran takes you down to boots on the ground." All that, he says, makes an attack on Iran a "dumb idea." Abizaid, the current Centcom boss, chose his words carefully last May. "Look, any war with a country that is as big as Iran, that has a terrorist capability along its borders, that has a missile capability that is external to its own borders and that has the ability to affect the world's oil markets is something that everyone needs to contemplate with a great degree of clarity."

And don't let all the current conservative hawk flim-flamm about Bush's own State Dept. being appeasers who have been trying to negotiate, without preconditions, with Iran all along. At every stage the Bush administration has set up diplomatic efforts to fail - by refusing to be publicly a direct party to nuclear talks; by demanding that Iran give up an uranium enrichment program which it is allowed by the NPT as a precondition to negotiations on what it would take to, um, have Iran give up its uranium enrichment program; and by constantly rattling sabres in Tehran's direction with such ludicrously hyped faux-crises as the ever-changing EFP narrative in Iraq and the infamous speedboat video in January.

Today in a syndicated piece military and security analyst Tom Barnett clearly states why Israel wants the US to be its proxy against Iran:

let's be clear that Israel would be protecting its long-standing regional monopoly on weapons of mass destruction. That monopoly hasn't kept Israel safe from conventional military attack; Israel's military superiority does that. It also hasn't prevented terrorism, even though Israel maintains a world-class defensive capacity there too.

All Tel Aviv's WMD monopoly generates is diplomatic opportunity: As soon as somebody else in the region gets a few nukes to challenge Israel's roughly 200 warheads, the world's great powers will collectively force direct negotiations leading to � at least � a bilateral strategic arms treaty between the two states.

Why? We'll all find the resulting situation too much to bear, not just in the West but far more in the East, which relies on Persian Gulf energy too much to suffer such strategic uncertainty.

What does that get us? It gets us Iran having to recognize Israel to achieve its primary goal in pursuing a nuclear capacity � namely, America's promise not to engage in forcible regime change in Tehran.

Since that goal will be effectively achieved by Tehran's looming nuclear capacity anyway, then we're heading into a different dynamic: Simultaneously creating a stable nuclear stand-off between Israel and Iran, a dyad that quickly becomes a triad if Saudi Arabia decides that Arab Sunnis need their own nuclear champion to balance the Persian Shiites.

For many regional and nuclear experts, such developments would constitute an almost unthinkably unstable strategic situation, but again, the only way to stabilize such a situation would be to force a trilateral or even regional security scheme that acknowledges each state's nuclear weapons explicitly and links those capabilities to one another through the condition of mutually-assured destruction.

Republicans in America may well be calculating that a blockade of Iran would be the very best kind of war for their political chances come November - lots of fear and good TV coverage of grey warships projecting American military power providing a distraction from the Iraqi debacle of five years but no actual shooting or US deaths. Let's all sit a moment and remind ourselves of their previous unwarranted optimisms about "cakewalk" military adventures.

And let's all wonder about whether preserving Israel's nuclear bully pulpit and Republican votes give enough good reasons for yet another military adventure in the Middle East.